Alabama's Black Belt counties seek historic designation

Nineteen Alabama counties comprising Alabama's Black Belt are banding together in an attempt to win designation as a national heritage area.

Tina Naremore Jones, a co-chair of the effort and the director of the University of West Alabama's Center for the Study of the Black Belt, said the designation, which requires an act of Congress, would bring help from the National Park Service in managing, promoting and marketing the region's natural, historical and cultural assets. It also would help define the image of the region.

"What you are really doing is getting people to tell the story of the area, and we have wonderful stories to tell," Jones said. "Nineteen counties is a huge area, but we are all similar in various ways."

There are 37 national heritage areas spread across the country, none so far in Alabama. A bill that has passed the U.S. House of Representatives would create a Muscle Shoals National Heritage Area covering a six-county area in northwest Alabama. Also pursuing the designation is the Chattahoochee Trace National Heritage Area, comprising seven southeast Alabama counties and 11 counties in southwestern Georgia.

A national heritage area is a place, designated by Congress, where "natural, cultural, historic and recreational resources combine to form a cohesive, nationally distinctive landscape arising from patterns of human activity shaped by geography."

Rich, dark soil:

The defining landscape of the swath of counties that stretch across the central section of the state is the Black Belt Prairie: a zone of rich, dark soil underlain by a bed of chalk.

Before white settlement, the land was covered in native grasses. But starting in the 1830s, the area experienced a rush of settlement after it was discovered that the soil and heat made ideal conditions for growing cotton. Soon, the Black Belt became the state's richest region, sprinkled with large plantations worked by slave labor. The resulting racial mix - most Black Belt counties are majority black - produced a rich culture of food, art and music.

The wealth of the antebellum era left magnificent mansions and fine architecture, but the legacy of slavery led to decades of struggle for political equality and an ongoing struggle with low education levels and poverty.

"We are a depressed area," said John Matthews, a Wilcox County commissioner and a member of the committee helping prepare the heritage area proposal. "We need the investment that tourism would bring."

Until recently, the region's racial divisions and some of the more painful aspects of its past have tended to make discussions of history tense. But Matthews said he believes attitudes are changing.

"We are still struggling with it," Matthews said. "How do you move forward from a painful era ... You address it. We are not going to move forward if we cannot embrace our past."

People both inside and outside the region have begun to recognize its cultural and natural resources. A prime example is the attention the Gee's Bend quilters have received in recent years. The quilters' works have been compared to masters of modern art. The acclaim their work has generated has brought tourists to Wilcox County, something Matthews said he hopes the county can build on.

"There are three things we could get out of this: It would preserve what is in the Black Belt and bring that to the attention of people all over the country. It would stimulate economic growth, promote tourism. And it would educate people about what the region has to offer," Matthews said.

State commission:

The heritage area effort grew out of the work of Gov. Bob Riley's Black Belt Action Commission. The commission's tourism committee and the Alabama Bureau of Tourism and Travel hired Fermata, a nature-based tourism consulting company, to catalog the historical and cultural sites and bring them together in a coherent form that could guide visitors through the region. A 40-page draft guide has been produced, which includes 54 nature and heritage sites and detailed instructions about traveling across the sparsely populated region.

"Before you can promote what you have, you have to figure out what you do have," said Jones.

While each individual county may have limited attractions, the region, taken together, has national significance spanning centuries.

Several sites in the Black Belt have the most significant dinosaur fossils in the eastern United States. At the northern edge sits Moundville, the collection of ceremonial mounds built by Mississippian Indians in what once was the largest city in North America. The Spanish explorer Hernando DeSoto trekked through in the 1540s and engaged in the bloodiest battle Europeans and American Indians ever fought in North America.

There are French, Spanish and British Colonial-era forts, antebellum houses and Civil War sites.

Post-Civil War attractions include Tuskegee University and the work of Booker T. Washington and George Washington Carver. Montgomery and Selma were home to some of the of the most significant moments of the civil rights movement. And, with Monroeville included in the heritage area, the region includes the birthplace of what is considered one of the best novels of the 20th Century, Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird."

Jones said her involvement in the project is in a way an extension of her interest in Ruby Pickens Tartt, the Livingston folklorist and writer who, in the early 20th century, recorded the stories, songs and folkways of the people around her.

A white woman, she was one of the first to recognize the value of the culture forged by the mixture of races in the Black Belt. "She is probably the reason I'm involved," Jones said. "She crossed cultural boundaries in many ways." On the Net